The Dummies Guide to VIAACs
'V'IRTUAL – Like the internet 'I'NTENTIONAL – Done with purpose 'A'BUNDANCE – Lots and Lots for everyone 'A'CCESS - No Red-tape 'C'OMMUNITY – Group of people Intro So, if you’re reading this, then you’ve probably noticed that there’s something wrong with the world today, and that things are getting a little crazy. Jobs are hard to find and machines are taking over, so they’re even harder to keep. The banks are either out to get your house and your car, or they’ve got them already. Politicians are making an absolute mess of service delivery, and everywhere you look it’s just war, and crime and corruption. Nobody that has a job seems to know how to do it properly, or doesn’t seem to care even when they do know. You’ve probably also heard of a Resource Based Economy, where there is no money, or politics, or war, or crime, and everyone is healthy, and “jobs” are different, because nobody’s doing work that they hate, and everyone is equal, and technology takes care of the rest. But it’s hard to understand how we get to this RBE setup from this really messed up situation we’re in. It’s confusing and we’re being asked to change (which is always difficult), and we’ve already been struggling for so long, that many are just too tired to change anything. The main reason we feel this way, is that we have to keep paying so that we can live, and most of us can’t afford it. It doesn’t even matter how unfair it is, it just is, and we can either accept it or we can’t, money doesn’t care either way. But what if it didn’t have to be this way? What if we COULD afford to keep living? What if ALL OF US could afford it? I know I would have a lot less stress in my life if I wasn’t constantly making plans to ensure the next meal would be there when I got hungry, and the same is basically true of everyone. THE VIAAC So how do we get to afford to keep living and change to this improved RBE world? By using a VIAAC of course. When you go to the store, the price of a 1kg bag of sugar is less than the price of a 2kg bag of sugar, but if you buy two 1kg bags of sugar, then it’s more expensive than buying a 2kg bag of sugar. So the more you buy, the cheaper it becomes. This is how buying in bulk saves us money and people all over the world have been doing it for a very long time. But there’s only so much that one home can buy in bulk, because where do we keep everything? We may have space for a 20 kg bag of sugar, but not for the bulk of everything we buy. And since the world is in deep trouble, most of us don’t have the space for even the 20kg bag of sugar. Also, the savings is actually not that much when we buy on such a small scale. What we really need, is to be able to buy enough for a whole community. Then we’re talking 20 tons of sugar, and the savings becomes massive. So if we can work out how much sugar the whole community really needs, and how much they would normally buy, we can buy in bulk for the whole community, without wasting a drop, and everyone getting exactly as much sugar as they want, and the whole community is saving. So let’s picture the entire community as one business, only, instead of having a ceo, and a board of directors who can get rich while everyone else struggles, every community member is both an employee and the owner of the company. The business now has the entire community’s money, and because the every member of the community is worth whatever the business is worth, everyone in the community is suddenly a millionaire. This seems too good to be true, and it is, because it’s only as a combined unit that the community has this “buying power”. This means that the business needs to be clever about how it spends its money, and what it invests in. If the company uses its money on sustainable stuff like solar energy and wind energy, the employees can get everything for even cheaper, because all staff members get a staff discount. Now, since the community is getting everything at discounted prices, they don’t really need to keep earning so much money, and in fact, everything traded within the company can be traded at exactly cost price, because nobody needs any kind of profit. This is not a free ride though. You may own the company, but that means that for you to keep living the good life, you’re going to have to work toward a strong community where everyone does their bit. The interesting part is, that doing your bit simply means doing things you already know how to do, or learning how to do things you’re interested in from people who already know how, and all the jobs that no-one wants to do? We get technology to take care of that. Nobody wants to clean toilets, so you build a self cleaning toilet (these already exist and a VIAAC could buy them at reduced prices). The VIAAC is not a Utopia, or even anything close to a Utopia. It is not perfect, but it is better than the way we’re doing things now.